CoolIT Systems Teams Up with Ciara, iStarUSA for Liquid-Cooled Servers

CoolIT Systems, a leading supplier of liquid cooling solutions for various purposes, has teamed up with several companies in Demand Liquid Alliance to promote liquid-cooled servers, which so far have been exotic and proprietary. The first partners to sell server chassis with rack direct-contact liquid cooling and actual liquid-cooled servers will be iStarUSA Group and Ciara Technologies.

Water Running into Datacenters

Specifically targeting the thermal management issues of today’s data centers, CoolIT’s specially designed rack direct contact liquid cooling (Rack DCLC) technology offers cooling performance that allows for a combination of increased density and decreased power usage. The Rack DCLC design works within existing infrastructure and can be adapted to suit specific customer needs, making it a great fit and essential upgrade in any data center environment.

CoolIT’s DCLC technology is based on the company’s patented pure copper micro-channel cold-plates that quickly and efficiently absorb heat and transports it away from CPU or GPU components. Within a rack, a low-pressure (coolant) server loop runs through each server, collects the heat from the processors and delivers it to a liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger via a hot/cold liquid distribution manifold. The heat exchanger unit extracts the heat from the coolant loop and transfers it to a facility water loop exiting the heat exchanger. The heat is then carried out of the data center and transferred into the atmosphere using the existing facilities thermal management infrastructure (i.e. dry cooler, cooling tower, etc.).

“What we are doing is producing technology that, for the first time, allows smaller innovative HPC vendors to deliver ultra dense, high performance systems one rack at a time,” said Geoff Lyon, chief executive officer and chief technology officer of CoolIT Systems.

CoolIT’s Rack DCLC can be implemented in several ways – with different flow-rate and water temperature – to take away from 10kW to 45kW of heat per rack:

With flow rate of less than 5L/min at 10°C facility water Rack DCLC maintains over 10kW of total CPU cooling capacity, which results in reductions in facility water usage and means serious cost savings.

With flow rate of 30L/min at 10°C facility water Rack DCLC can remove over 45kW of heat.

With flow rate of 30L/min at 50°C facility water the Rack DLC technology can cool over 10kW per rack with hot water at less than 30L/min, which translates to incredible operating expenditures savings due to elimination of chillers (up to 35% of cooling costs), free-air cooling, throttled down CRAC/CRAH systems, and less reliance on server fans.

“We are overclocking our CPUs in a 1U chassis allowing for densities never seen before. Our customers are demanding unprecedented compute productivity and CoolIT’s Rack DCLC allows us to deliver”, said Darcy Letemplier, vice president of engineering at Ciara Technologies.

Rack DCLC is allowing Ciara to build and test server architecture in a 1U form factor that was previously only available in a 3U chassis. By allowing for a 67% increase in compute density per rack, Ciara’s new overclocked server architecture will not only allow for more compute productivity per core; but will also allow customers to fit high-powered clusters in much smaller space.

“We are amazed at the performance levels that Ciara has been able to achieve once the cooling limitations were removed. The Ciara engineering team has taken an innovative approach with their hardware decisions and by leveraging the liquid cooling advantage, they have created a unique offering for the high performance computing market,” said Mr. Lyon.

iStar USA to Enable Small OEMs with Rack DCLC-Compatible Chassis

iStarUSA Group, a specialist in OEM/ODM projects and manufacturing industrial power supply, DVR/IPC rack mount chassis, teamed up with CoolIT Systems to offer leading-edge liquid cooling technology in the most popular iStarUSA chassis. Even small server makers will be able to assemble rack servers featuring advanced liquid cooling.

Starting immediately, bundled solutions are available for iStarUSA's D-200 (2U), D-300 (3U), and D-400 (4U) chassis, and more of iStarUSA’s chassis are being tested for compatibility. Included in every product bundle is a chassis, CoolIT’s closed-loop maintenance free liquid cooling system and all necessary hardware for mounting to any AMD or Intel processor.